Tiny questions with quick answers - continuing thread

mmmm… Catrin and I agree that we’d probably say ‘gallu bod’ - maybe just because it’s easier to say? And that we’d understand ‘medru bod’, but probably just not expect it as much…

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Thanks Aran. So I have then picked up ‘gallu bod’ as it’s easier to say or makes more sense used like that quite naturally, cool!

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I’m not sure if you are on Twitter. There is a Gwehwysig WOTD (Word of the day) on there, and you can ask general questions.

Since following SSiW WOTD, I seem to have caught the bug and seem to be collecting as many of these different WOTD’s as possible.

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Sounds interesting - I’m not on twitter, but will definately have a look. I saw a translation for that song “Ar Ben Waun Tredegar”, but I think the translation I saw is wrong in lots of places.

“Fy nghariad a notws i wylad y nos” is translated as
“My love determined to watch the night”

I think it feels more like “My cariad is known for being very lively at night”

The GPC has nodio as meaning ‘to note’ but also ‘determine’. At a guess, could it be the English word ‘notice’ being used to mean a different sense of the Welsh equivalent ‘nodio’?

ETA: I was thinking - based on the translation you quoted - that wylad might be a variant on (g)wylio.

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Just had another squint at the GPC, and it does indeed list gwylad amongst the various possible versions of gwylio :slight_smile:

ETA: Looking up Colloquial Welsh vs Literary on Wikipedia in trying to figure out something in a new book I’ve started, I happened to see (in Colloquial Welsh Morphology) that “in parts of South Wales you sometimes hear -ws instead of -odd” on short past tenses of verbs. So it’s probably nothing to do with ‘notice’ at all - just dialect for nododd i wylio.

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it also lists gwylad as gwyl + ad. merry, glad or lively from 10th century guiillat - hilaris.

So to me partying or going wild at night fits as well.

In the next line she said a lot of cross words and in the last line she nearly broke his heart.

To me his cariad is a bit of a party girl with a gob on her who is tearing his heart apart?

PS I work ar ben waun Tredegar as it now happens, hence my interest in the song. Well I say that I work on waun Tredegar but no-one ive asked seems to know where the waun is - there are three potentially - there are wauns to the North, east and west of the town.

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A bit of a long shot but as you mentioned that the character liked to talk a lot, how about “Wilia”, which the Y Wenhwyseg account has for to talk or yap like a dog, from chwedleua.

Gareth King’s Modern Welsh Dictionary has “Chwedl” as a fairy tale, etc.

Hi, again. Are there any words that you find to be too similar for comfort? I’m thinking of ones like trafodaeth (discussion) and tafodiaith (dialect). Anyway, as usual, hopefully the context will help to distinguish one from the other.

Also “osws”, is this the same as “os oes”, please?

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The ones that almost always trip me up are dyfalu and dychmygu. Whichever one I want, it’s always the other that pops into my head first!

Without knowing the context, osws could well be os oes - I can’t think what else it might be but that doesn’t mean it definitely couldn’t be anything else.

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Me too!
Also dywilliant (culture) and dywidiant (industry). It’s already hard enough keeping up with history programmes, but as soon as I hear either of those I’m thrown!

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Yes you get ‘ws’ ending in the 3rd person past which together for the tendancy of Gwenhwyseg to harden b, g and d (to p, c and t) gives nododd as notws

cymeriad and camgymeriad - character and mistake

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Surely dyfalu a difaru? :slight_smile:

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Those are the two (amongst others) that get me every time.

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Dyfalu and diflannu

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Nope - dychmygu and dyfalu get mixed up in English first - am I imagining or guessing? And which one is which anyway? Or at least that’s my problem, don’t know about you @siaronjames!

no, funnily enough I don’t get difaru confused! (I try not to have any! ;-))

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yup, I’ve tried going with “dychmygu = to imagine because they’ve both got the m”, but I still have to pause and check which one is winning the race to come out of my mouth! :smile:

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Difalu and diflanu definitely and also awgrymu , its taken me weeks to learn that. I really want it to mean to complain.

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